1. Technical Field
This disclosure relates to computer networking. More specifically, this disclosure relates to methods and apparatuses for optimizing secure communications.
2. Related Art
Enterprise networks can include one or more wide-area networks (WANs) that interconnect offices that can be distributed over a large geographical area. Improving performance of the enterprise network is important because it improves productivity, which in turn increases profitability of the organization.
Some enterprise networks use WAN optimization devices to improve network performance. WAN optimization devices optimize network traffic to improve WAN performance in reading and/or writing data over a network. Some WAN optimization devices monitor users' network traffic to attempt to predict data likely to be requested by users. This predicted data is prefetched over the WAN and cached by the WAN optimization devices at the users' respective network locations, so that this data can be quickly accessed by users if requested. WAN optimization devices also typically compress data (e.g., by performing de-duplication) to improve WAN performance. The WAN optimization devices' prefetching, caching, and compression helps mask the bandwidth and latency limitations of WANs from users.
WAN optimization devices may operate singly or in pairs at each side of a WAN connection to optimize network traffic. WAN optimization devices are referred to in the art by many different terms, including, but not limited to, transaction accelerators, WAN optimizers, WAN optimization controllers (WOCs), wide-area data services (WDS) appliances, WAN traffic optimizers (WTOs), and protocol accelerators or optimizers.
Techniques for optimizing network traffic to improve network performance in reading and/or writing data over a network are referred to in the art by many different terms, including, but not limited to, WAN acceleration, transaction acceleration, transaction pipelining, protocol pipelining, request prediction, application flow acceleration, and protocol acceleration. In this disclosure, the term “WAN optimization device” is used to refer to such devices and applications and “WAN optimization” is used to refer to such techniques.
Optimizing secure communications is especially challenging because secure communications typically use encryption and/or authentication, which usually impedes operations such as prefetching, caching, and compression that are performed by WAN optimization devices.